CUGG Member Article

Windows Tip: Traceroute

Lowell Shatraw, CUGG

October 2001

Have you had problems lately downloading a file, or do you feel your
connection to your ISP or some other site is slow. Traceroute (or
tracert) can show you if that site has slow connections along the way
between you and the site. You will be looking for lower numbers in the
"round-trip" columns.

The following shows sample output for tracert. The first column is the
hop number, which is the Time To Live (TTL) value set in the packet.
Each of the next three columns contains the round-trip times in
milliseconds for an attempt to reach the destination with that TTL
value. An asterisk (*) means that the attempt timed out. The fourth
column is the host name (if it was resolved) and IP address of the
responding system. I did not specify the maximum number of hops, 30 is
the default. I did not use the host name resolution because of space
limitations in the newsletter. The -d
command parameter eliminates the host name.

C:\WINDOWS>
tracert -d www.uswest.com

Tracing route to
www.qwest.net [204.147.80.81] over a maximum of 30 hops: